American conservatives, Trump included, by definition cannot be Right Wing, because their primary goal is to lessen government control over the individual.

John Lott wrote an article challenging the media’s contention that the New Zealand mosque shooter is “right wing” and, naturally, tying that right-winged-ness to President Trump and his supporters. Lott based his challenge on the fact that the shooter’s manifesto, aside from some trolling about Trump and Candace Owens, aligns perfectly with the Left’s ideology and is utterly unrelated to Trump’s words or policies. It’s a good article and I recommend it.

I want to head in a slightly different direction which is to say, as I have said before, that there is no Right Wing in America, meaning that neither Trump nor his supporters can or should be smeared in that way. Moreover, there is almost no relationship between ostensible conservatives outside of America and those of us in America who identify as conservatives. We are entirely different breeds. I have a tendency to be wordy, but I’ll try to keep this as streamlined as possible.

I’ll start with the absolutely true statement that there are only two forms of government: Bigger Government and Smaller Government. No matter the label affixed to the governing entity, it’s either Bigger, which means fewer individual rights, or Smaller, which means more individual rights. This is true whether the government is a monarchy, an aristocracy, an oligarchy, a republic, a democracy, a theocracy, a junta, or whatever. It’s not the label that matters; it’s the amount of government control versus individual liberty. Of course, socialist governments, whether denominated as socialist, communist, or fascist, are all Big (indeed, Biggest) Governments by definition.

“Right Wing” and “Left Wing” are purely European concepts, dating to the French Parliament in the lead-up to the French Revolution. The people to the right of the Speaker were monarchists; the people to the Left were revolutionaries in what came to be understood as the socialist mold. Both sides demanded Biggest Government with total control over the individual.

The battle between Bigger Government political powers raged in Europe through the 19th century and continued in continental Europe right into the 1930s. During that decade, the two rising political movements were both socialist. One socialist movement, communism, demanded nationalizing all private property as party of its Biggest Government plan. The other socialist movement, fascism, agreed to leave private property in private hands, provided that the government called the shots. It was therefore still a Biggest Government ideology.* [Read more…]

Democrats and Muslims have come together with anti-Semitism because it is their ideological destiny — and Leftist Jews are too indoctrinated to see it.

One of the fascinating things about the world in which we live is the alliance between Leftists and Muslims. At first glance, it seems as if they have nothing in common. Leftists tout women’s rights; Muslims tout women’s burqas. Leftists tout LGBTQ rights; Muslims tout homosexual hangings. Leftists purport to hate slavery; Muslims have slavery as a core doctrine. Leftists hate rape; Muslims have rape as another core doctrine.

Given these profound differences, one way to account for the Leftist/Muslim alliance today is to look to the old Arab adage stating “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Or, as Aristotle said first, “a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.”) Both the Left and Islam are united in a fight against Western civilization. And significantly, the thing they are fighting against most fiercely is what lies at the core of Western civilization: The value of the individual.

Here’s the thing: Despite their superficial differences, Leftists and Muslims have something very profound in common, which is that both are completely totalitarian ideologies. Each envisions complete control over all people around the world. Individualism is anathema to them. It is this common vision that binds them in the short term. In the long term, of course, each assumes that its ideology will be victorious and that, like the Borg, the winning ideology (whether Islam or Leftism) will either assimilate or destroy the losing ideology (whether Leftism or Islam).

Oh, I almost forgot. There’s another thing that binds them and that is their abiding hatred for Jews. (They hate other religions too, don’t get me wrong, as we can see from the murderous purge of Christians across the Muslim world as well as the softer effort to purge Christians in America. But there’s something about the Jews….) [Read more…]

Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance and Proggies went insane — and of course, they went stupid, too. All that and more in this Bookworm Beat.

Apparently “honesty” and “integrity” have a different meaning inside the beltway. I was one of the millions who appreciated Admiral McRaven’s commencement speech at the University of Texas a few years ago, when he spoke about life lessons he’d picked up as a SEAL. Indeed, ever since then, I make my bed every morning. As he said, you’ll start your day with an accomplishment and, if it’s been a bad day, you come home to a nicely made bed. Those are two solid reasons to make a bed.

Just because I like McRaven’s homespun military wisdom, though, doesn’t mean I have to like his politics. Nor do I have to like the loopy Leftist logic that he reveals thanks to his politics. For example, in a much touted op-ed in the WaPo, McRaven actually called John Brennan “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question….”

It just goes to show that, in both Dem world and D.C. world, “integrity,” “honesty,” and “character” have different meanings than they do in the real world. After all, in the real world, no one would say it shows honesty, integrity, or character to lie repeatedly to Congress, but that’s what Brennan did.

By the way, I’m not even talking about the most recent go-round of lies. I’m talking about the lies in 2014, when Brennan was still living in the wonders of Obama-world. Back then, the lies were wrapped around the illegal activity of the CIA spying on our own government:

As reports emerged Thursday that an internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general found that the CIA “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers when researching the CIA’s dark history of torture, it was hard to conclude anything but the obvious: John Brennan blatantly lied to the American public. Again.

After the CIA inspector general’s report completely contradicted Brennan’s statements, it now appears Brennan was forced to privately apologize to intelligence committee chairs in a “tense” meeting earlier this week.

Brennan was so bad that, back in 2014, the same WaPo that now has McRaven leaping to Brennan’s defense because Trump yanked Brennan’s security clearance, had its own opinions editor (not a guest) demand that Obama fire Brennan:

An apology and an internal review board might suffice if this were Brennan or intelligence leaders’ first offense, but the track record is far from spotless. In 2011, Brennan claimed that dozens of U.S. drone strikes on overseas targets had not killed a single civilian. This remarkable success rate was not only disputed at the time by news reports — even supporters of the drone program called it “absurd” — but as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New York Times both reported later, President Obama received reports from the very beginning of his presidency about drone strikes killing numerous civilians. As Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, Brennan would have received these reports as well, so either Brennan knew that his claim was a lie, or he is secretly deaf. Similarly, Brennan denied snooping on Senate computers six weeks after Feinstein first made the accusation to the CIA in private, which means either that he was lying, or he had ignored a serious charge against his agency for six weeks, then spouted off about it without any real knowledge — hardly the behavior expected of an agency director.

And last year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress when he told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the National Security Agency did not collect any kind of data on millions of Americans, a claim later disproved by documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Despite Clapper receiving criticism from both sides of the aisle, the damage to Clapper’s and the White House’s credibility on intelligence and civil liberties issues and, well, the fact that lying to Congress is a crime (though one that’s difficult to prosecute), Obama has not disciplined Clapper in any way.

Brennan is a bad apple and has always been a bad apple, going back to his communist days. Once upon a time, the Left understood this, but Leftists are so infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome that, as many have said, if Trump figured out a way to cure cancer, the Leftists would demand he stop hurting cancer.

Oh, and to the extent McRaven, in the WaPo piece, asked to have his security clearance pulled too, I think Trump should oblige him. First, security clearance is a privilege, not a right, and one that operates to benefit the U.S., not the security holder. Which leads me to the second point, which is that McRaven has shown that his years at the Pentagon have warped his values, common sense, and ability to understand the common meaning of words. That’s not a good man to possess to valuable a privilege. Anyway who can look at the hysterical, dishonest Brennan and think he’s a safe man to trust with a security clearance has proven himself too lacking in sense to have his own clearance.

Incidentally, the current crop of lies against Trump don’t stop with denying that Brennan lies. Just in case you read the defense of Brennan that he was the point man on the bin Laden raid, he wasn’t:

#FakeNews MSM is calling Brennan the “point man on the Bin Laden raid.”

He wasn’t. He wasn’t even working for CIA then. He was WH Homeland Security Advisor. He was simply a non essential body in the Situation Room watching the raid.

For decades, American Leftists have hidden their close ties to fascism. Dinesh D’Souza’s PragerU video reveals those ties. His book lays them wide open.

Knowing that it was unlikely ever to show up at my local library, I treated myself to a new book this weekend: Dinesh D’Souza’s The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. I’m familiar with the larger outline — namely that fascism was and is a Leftist phenomenon — but the book is a delight in that it fleshes out that outline. It also exposes one of the American Left’s deepest secrets, which was the fact that Hitler drew some of his strongest inspiration from Democrat principles and policies regarding race.

If you want a preview of what D’Souza offers in his book, I recommend spending five minutes watching the latest PragerU video:

As I understand it, fascists envision America as a vast beehive, with every bee laboring unstintingly and unceasingly for the good of the hive. That each worker bee leads a miserable, constrained life is irrelevant. American Leftists all imagine themselves as Queen Bees, so each is able to avoid the disheartening thought that he or she is nothing more than a drone, destined to labor and die, without choice as to labor, without joy, without individual liberty. [Read more…]

Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” A brave journalist reporting on Antifa proves Orwell was right.

If you ever question whether the American media has morphed into Pravda — a tightly controlled outlet for socialist propaganda — you need to check out a Facebook post from Frank Somerville (which I’ve embedded below). Somerville, if you’re wondering, is a very well-respected San Francisco Bay Area TV journalist.

Somerville’s post is an interesting one at two levels. First, it’s interesting because he reports honestly about the hatred and violence that characterized Antifa’s latest riot in Berkeley.

Second — and this is the important part — it’s interesting because he feels compelled to explain the pressure he felt not to do this accurate, honest reporting, including pressure from his wife, who fears for his safety (whether professional or personal is not clear).

As you read the following words, keep in mind that Somerville is not a journalist in Putin’s Russia or in Iran or in the Gaza strip. He is a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area who has to screw up his courage and take a stand to report . . . the facts:

M wife told me I’m going to get crucified by posting this. I told her I didn’t care. This is what happened. This is what I saw. This is what I experienced. This is the truth. Period. If people dont want to heat the truth thats not my problem. I have No agenda. Im just saying that this is what happened to me today, think about it. And make your own decision.

Google’s promise was that it would allow an unfettered platform for free speech and thought. Its college-grad employees, though, made it a fascism farm.

I stopped using Google’s search engine years ago, although I’m still chained to Gmail. I was one of the first Gmail users back when it was in beta and it would upset my life a great deal if I had to switch email addresses. Still, depending on how Google comports itself in the next couple of months, Gmail may have to go too. There’s no reason for my email use to advance its fascist agenda.

Did I say “fascist agenda”? Why, yes, I think I did. That’s because Google’s decision to fire an employee who dared to speak out against the Leftist lockstep that governs everything from its workplace to its search algorithm manipulations is entirely fascist. Google is its own little state, one governed by hardcore Leftist ideology, and anyone who speaks out against that must be purged.

I actually don’t have anything original to say on the subject, but there’s so much smart stuff out there, I thought I’d share it with you. Let me begin with a collection of employee self-written bios that Paul Joseph Watson found (click on image to enlarge):

James Damore was fired for expressing his opinions. Google his name and you will find that the left-wing press is demonizing him relentlessly.

Ironically, the entire affair proves his conclusions. By firing him, Google has proven that it is an intolerant ideological echo chamber.

Several fragile female engineers stayed home from their jobs at Google because the memo made them feel uncomfortable, or unsafe, or whatever parlance these overgrown babies default to in order to impose their cultural fascism on the rest of us. Presumably, these female engineers took to their fainting couches for a few hours in order to get over the shock of a non-leftist opinion.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the gulags and graveyards were filled with people who expressed opinions that the leadership considered incorrect.

In America, the left does not build gulags… not yet, anyway. Instead, it resorts to shame and creates unemployment.

Daniel Greenfield points out that the problem isn’t limited to Google. As long as Google controls much of the internet, it’s a problem for all of us:

James Damore is an FIDE chess master who studied at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. He had been working as a software engineer at Google for four years.

Danielle Brown is the new Vice President of Diversity at Google. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and campaigned for Hillary.

She had been working at Google for a few weeks.

[snip]

Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers.

[snip]

Google has embedded partisan attacks on conservatives into its search and news territories under the guise of “fact checks”. It has fundamentally shifted results for terms such as “Jihad” to reflect Islamist propaganda rather than the work of counterterrorism researchers such as Robert Spencer. And it wasn’t the first time. Google had been previously accused of manipulating search results during Brexit.

Censorship has long been a problem on YouTube. And it will now officially be caging “controversial” videos using a method developed by Jigsaw. Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is Google’s left-wing incubator developing social justice tech.

[snip]

Damore, like so many of us, wasn’t thinking the way that Google thought he should be thinking. And so it dealt with the problem by getting rid of him. When users search for results that Google doesn’t like, it guides them to what it thinks they should be looking for. If they persist, then the results vanish. If they upload videos it doesn’t like, they get censored. That’s the totalitarian left-wing Google model in action.

Google is approaching the ecological dead end of its technological niche. There’s not much else to do except make fringe investments that are little more than disguised advertising and build more free apps to feed into its own ad business while driving traffic to them through its search and Android leverage.

If the business model ever fails or the government takes a closer look at its abuses, then it’s all over.

I am sure most readers of this blog are aware of the incident that occurred several weeks ago at Claremont MacKenna college, when progressive students — aided and abetted by the school administration and local police who merely stood by — succeeded in shutting down a speech by the scholar and prolific author, Heather MacDonald. Ms. MacDonald has been researching and speaking on law enforcement issues for three decades and has proven an erudite critic of the Black Lives Matter crowd and their progressive enablers in the past administration.

In the wake of the incident, Pomona College President David Oxtoby penned an open letter critical of the rioters who shut down Ms. MacDonald’s speech. I recently chanced upon a letter by three black students at Pomona College responding to Mr. Oxtoby. It is a horrific diatribe that gives some insights into the progressive Left’s most detestable aspects all of which are aimed squarely at undoing the Enlightenment. I’ll quote selectively from the letter, which you can read in its entirety here.

. . . Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability [sic] to protect the students that it serves. The paradox is that Pomona’s past is rooted in domination of marginalized peoples and communities and the student body has a significant population of students from these backgrounds.

Given the substantive lack of racism in the American mainstream and the complete lack of institutionalized racism, the victim’s studies programs apparently teach that all governing systems in this country are irredeemably tarred with racism and, by their mere continued existence, somehow de facto function as racist institutions to the detriment of ____________ [fill in your “marginalized peoples” identity here]. The authors obviously see progressive paradigm as giving them absolute moral authority and the right to demand special treatment, not merely for past sins that occurred long before they were ever born, but for a dark fantasy of ongoing sins. [Read more…]

Despite a small spark of rationality, Macalester College’s weekly paper displays the Progressive hate, ignorance, and nonsense at an American college.

Knowing my passion for free speech, someone sent me a small sign of hope: a link to a student-written opinion piece from the weekly student newspaper at Macalester University in Minnesota. To give a little context, in 2014 College Magazine ranked Macalester as the “Most Progressive Campus” in America. It’s also No. 10 on the Best Colleges’ “Most Liberal Colleges” list. In other words, it’s your average American college, right up there with some of the most prestigious, such as Yale, Harvard, or MIT, or some of the most embarrassing, such as Missouri or Pomona.

Unlike those other American colleges, however, Macalester is never in the news. I suspect this is because no student or faculty member would ever dream of inviting to the campus someone who doesn’t meet the Progressive purity scale. Without any opposing views, there is no call for violence.

It was therefore a great and pleasant surprise to discover that one young man is defending the free exchange of ideas. What moved Jacob Hill to write was the fact that the staff of the college radio station, perfectly emulating a Maoist re-education camp, grouped together to castigate a fellow employee for having dared to place on the college Facebook page a meme that “satirized the prevalence of white Adidas sneakers among women who claim not to conform to societal norms.” I’m having trouble envisioning how offensive such a meme could be but for the student’s cohorts at the radio station, it was a bridge too far. It was Mao time:

Less than 24 hours after the meme was posted, the original poster (a Mac Radio staff member) went to his WMCN staff meeting as usual. One of the commenters on the meme decided to make a speech calling him misogynistic, racist and homophobic. The speech was met with applause, and much of the WMCN staff agreed that his offensive behavior did not represent the culture of WMCN. He was not offered a chance to respond but rather asked to think about his actions for a week.

Showing a grasp of logic denied to most young Progressives, Hill points out that advancing feelings as the alpha and omega of all disputes ends rational discussion:

A later comment on the original post read: “you don’t get to decide what’s offensive to other people—if it’s offensive to them, that’s it. You don’t get to critique that fact.” This ‘fact’ is particularly what makes offense so messy. No one knows exactly what will offend others. It’s an ongoing dialogue. Macalester students, in their haste to eliminate every suggestion that may be perceived as offensive, missed the opportunity for this dialogue. I don’t personally believe that the poster had malintent, but even if he did, is calling him a racist/misogynist/homophobe really the best way to make your point? Too often, liberal Millennials believe they can end a conversation by calling out someone’s “isms.” Yes, these claims are powerful, but that is precisely why they must be backed by context, logic, and most of all, truth.

There’s more and Hill deserves kudos for every word he writes. This is a young man who, somehow, somewhere, was exposed to an intellectual world that transcends navel-gazing emotionalism that’s par for the course at an American college.

As of this writing, Hill’s short article had garnered three comments: The first agrees with and encourages respectful dialog; the third agrees with Hill and expresses surprise that The Weekly Mac published Hill’s piece; and the second . . . well, the second comment shows that the writer has embraced an authoritarian worldview that brooks no criticism:

I question the decision of the Mac Weekly to publish such a targeted opinion piece, especially as the author writes of the pitfalls of “isolating and humiliating” specific people in the name of a greater conversation. [The author did not name anybody, although it’s reasonable to assume that in a small community, most students could identify not only the daring Facebook transgressor but also his Maoist accusers.] Also: this idea of “listening politely” looks to be teetering quite close to the edge of a compulsory silence.

Hill, as I said, gave me hope. Scanning the rest of The Mac Weekly’s offerings depressed me. In just one week’s worth of writing, there are so many bad ideas. These are bad ideas arising from a solid basis of factual ignorance, unexamined bias, Marxism, Alinsky-esque thinking, self-loathing, third-wave feminism, misandry, and anti-Semitism. Here are just a couple of examples:

The new phrase is “fourth branch of government,” referring to the Progressive bureaucracy fighting exile. It’s time to fight back.

The administrative state is not the fourth branch of government. When I said “interesting times,” I meant it. We all knew that our government had gotten too big and we voted for Trump believing that he would make good on his promise to shrink it.

Trump certainly has been trying to fulfill that promise, but the administrative state has been fighting back in ways we never imagined. Rather than recognizing that our Constitution makes it subordinate to the president, so that it must take its marching orders from him, the administrative state is setting itself up as a permanent government in opposition, determined to continue the policies that put Obama into office and kept Hillary out of office.

The Washington Examiner has written an excellent editorial that warns of the dangers in a self-styled fourth branch of government:

As we once noted in a different context, “civil disobedience is properly the tool of the citizenry, not of those entrusted by it to execute the law faithfully.” We also wrote that America “cannot survive every minor public official becoming a law unto himself.” This is just as true of unconstitutional actions by EPA employees as it was for the official about whom we wrote it — Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court‘s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The Examiner is not the only one sounding this warning. Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA employee and a Democrat is sounding the same warning with special emphasis on people in the intelligence community. Noting the extraordinary power they hold, he says that the only way to keep a free state is for them to keep out of politics — especially since there are constitutional actions they can take if they’re genuinely concerned about a president’s loyalty to the state. (Me, personally, I would have been concerned about Obama’s secret deals with Iran. . . .)

When you’re trained as a spy, you’re taught how to handle these kinds of situations. Upon learning the information, it gets tightly compartmented (restricted) and sent to the Department of Justice or Congress for investigation. If the evidence is found to be credible, the constitution makes clear what happens next: impeachment.

That’s how American democracy should work.

[snip]

However, some of America’s spies are deciding that that’s not enough. For reasons of misguided righteousness or partisan hatred, they’ve taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner. They have prosecuted their case in the court of public opinion, with likeminded media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post serving as court stenographers.

Elected by no one, responsible only to each other, these spies have determined that Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Will we slip so quickly into a banana republic, not because of anything Trump has done (his actions to date have been not only constitutional but consistent with prior presidents, including Obama), but because the Progressives will not give up power?

Lastly, if you want a superbly written article about the risks America faces at the hands of an unelected bureaucracy that refuses to hand over the power it accrued during the Obama era, read Matthew Continetti’s deservedly lauded essay asking who controls America.

Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

The great thing about the Leftists’ continuing mental breakdown well into the third week of President Trump’s administration is that they contribute endless material to great political posters. Looking at these posters, no wonder I’m viewing every day of the Trump presidency as better than any birthday. He’s imperfect, of course, but he’s so much better than I expected and living so deeply inside the Progressive psyche that I can only think that America may indeed have a good angel watching over her.

And yes, I know that the increasingly frenzied calls to have President Trump impeached, institutionalized, or — God forbid — assassinated are very disturbing and should make every American vigilant. However, the short-term offsetting benefit of this mental breakdown is that ordinary people are growing disgusted with the Democrat party and its shoddy, divisive principles. So, while the good times are rolling, sit back and enjoy some funny, insightful, and possibly disturbing political posters:

It’s serious business when Google — with its unimaginable reach and control over people’s understanding of their world — does what every single Leftie since WWII has done: conflate “fascism” with “right-wing.” I’ve been banging this gong for years. Rather than do yet another lengthy post, I’ll confine myself to a few brief remarks and then provide links to just a few in the laundry-list of posts I have on the subject.

A few words from fascism’s creator, Benito Mussolini:

The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Both fascism and communism are subsets of socialism. Fascism allows ostensibly private ownership, provided that this ownership, like everything else within the fascist state, is subject to state control. Communism simply does away entirely with the illusion of private ownership.

The fascist fight against communism in the 1930s (which led many British and American people who were scared of communism to embrace fascism) was not, as people then thought, a fight between communism and its opposite. It was an internecine battle between two closely related authoritarian ideologies.

With the Left’s mental breakdown escalating, and the fearful cries about fascism getting louder daily, I put together a rather crudely composed poster aimed at addressing what I see as a core problem with the constant claim that Trump represents a rebirth of 1950s fascism:

I keep thinking that, if people understood what fascism really is, they wouldn’t make this kind of stupid mistake. Of course, after watching the pink-hatted harridans, I’m probably expecting too much from my fellow Americans.

In several posts, I’ve hammered away at the Progressive canard that Donald Trump is a fascist and that conservatives generally are fascists. My central point — always — is that American conservatives, including Donald Trump, are the antithesis of fascists because they want less government control, while a defining feature of fascism is total government control (kind of along the lines of what Obama pushed and Hillary would have pushed further).

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.

Sadly, Kinsley reveals, as so many before him have, that academic degrees are no substitute for intelligence, knowledge, critical analysis, and basic logic. The term “fascist” is a very distinct one and Kinsley can apply it to Trump only by redefining it entirely. His is a deconstructionist effort that leeches all meaning from the word.

Because Kinsley’s essay is currently behind a paywall, let me summarize briefly what his argument is before I demonstrate what a shoddy piece of disinformation it is.

Kinsley opens in a defensive posture, absolving himself of proving Godwin’s Law, which holds that internet discussions always end with Hitler analogies. Instead, Kinsley boasts, “I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.”

What is this clinical sense? If you plow through an endless cascade of words, Kinsley accuses Trump of being a crony capitalist, not to enrich himself and his friends, but to claim boasting rights about his skills conferring material benefits on the American people. Kinsley calls this “corporate statism,” which he says is the same as “fascism,” although he considers himself too classy to call Trump a fascist (except when he calls Trump a fascist).

As is the case with so many Leftist arguments grounded in history, Kinsley could not be more wrong. “Corporate statism” is certainly a feature of Hitler’s fascism, but it’s also been a feature of Obama’s administration. Standing alone, corporate statism, while corrupt and unfair, is not fascism. It’s just garden-variety corruption. Actual “fascism” is not just about the state’s relationship to corporations; it’s also about the state’s relationship to the luckless individuals under its control.